This exciting new collaboration between Cara Tolmie and Rian Treanor is a highly kinetic and playful endeavour. Body-centric vocal explorations merge with intricate rhythmic systems forming a deliciously disorientating, hypersurreal space of semantic modulations, concrete poetry, cut-up beats and mimicked samples. Their sound is singular and tactile: dissociative dance music that reassembles contorting vocal lines and knotting biomechanics in an explorative network of unstable forms. It’s a blur of bodily fragility and ecstatic disruption, where swells of meaning rise and fall through clouds of synthetic buzz, fleeting breath, and stream-of-consciousness imagery.
The duo first performed together when Counterflows Festival paired them for a new commission at the historic Arches venue in 2023. Glasgow-born, Stockholm-based vocalist and performance artist Cara Tolmie brought her hypnotic vocal technique, Internal Singing - an intimate practice using breath, movement, and touch that explores the subtle binds between voice and body in an unsettling, engrossing sonic space. Treanor’s richly innovative work provided a compounding counterpart: radical, rave-infused structures that bent and contorted around Tolmie’s incantation.
The album Body Lapse (2025) which they will promote at the concert at Gibanja, marks their debut release together, arriving on Planet Mu as the label celebrates 30 years of groundbreaking electronic music. Growing out of a series of charged, improvisational performances, Body Lapse was recorded between Stockholm and Rotherham in 2024. Resonances of their live energy echo throughout the record - a voice shaking through the body, responding to touch, real-time sensation, and rhythmic modulation. Their recordings capture the raw presence of performance, translating it into something tactile and immediate. Together, they shape a sound of unsettling beauty and frictional intensity: a playful, physical mesh of computer music, voice, and speculative storytelling.
Cara Tolmie (UK/SE), born Glasgow, based in Stockholm, has been working in a deeply interdisciplinary way as a musician, artist and performer since graduating from art school in 2005. Her ongoing commitment to exploring the outer reaches of live vocalisation over the last 15 years has enabled her to develop a unique, astute and bold sonic palette of her own that often sends her audiences into mesmeric states of disbelief and awe. Her practice at large investigates the complexity of the bind between the voice and body - of how voice can traverse internal and external realities of both the sounder and listener and how it can research various qualities of embodiment, both pleasurable and disorienting. Within this she often explores performative techniques that dis/reorient the listening relationship between the singer and her audience through live uses of defamiliarised, improvised and repetitive vocalisation.
Rian Treanor (UK) re-imagines club culture, experimental art and computer music, presenting an insightful and compelling musical world of fractured and interlocking components. Having left a vivid impression with a string of releases on The Death of Rave & Warp sub-label Arcola, his debut album ATAXIA for Planet Mu in 2019 established him as both a disruptive and essential new voice in British underground club music. His latest album File Under UK Metaplasm takes inspiration from his residency at the Nyege Nyege collective's Boutique Studio in Kampala in 2018. Incorporating the high-def bass weight of his home town Sheffield with the enigmatic energy of Tanzanian Singeli and Footwork. Using the programming language Max/MSP he develops bespoke software to explore extended rhythmic techniques and algorithmic processes, building devices that enable spontaneous pattern modulation within various collaborations, workshops, live performances and installations.
